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“We still need those facilities. We don’t have certain things
that we need out on this site to make it a sustainable destination.
So the idea of going back to these original ideas and
reintroducing them is a great place to start.”
Which brings us back to the Architectural Archives. If you don’t
use the Kahn Collection for a project like this, says Whitaker,
“why have this stuff in the first place? A collection like this is
our cultural heritage. It’s part of how we understand what it is
to be a great architect, to make great architecture—and what
Lou Kahn and his collaborators did to make it work.”
“Bill was a bridge of interpreting,” says School of Design Dean
Marilyn Taylor. “He deserves incredible praise for his very quiet
but learned and persistent application of what he knew to help
us move through from what we had, to what should happen. And
he’s gotten acknowledgment for it, but maybe not enough.”
Back in the Architectural Archives, I ask Pattison how
she felt that rainy day in October when, after all the
dread and all the anxiety, she finally had a chance to
see the memorial that Kahn had first envisioned, with her
help, nearly 40 years before.
“Oh, amazement that this was built,” she says. “Really astonishment.
And going to the Room was wonderful.” The sight of
the great granite blocks, so artfully placed, suddenly made her
remember Kahn’s famous dictum: Consider the momentous event
in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.
She was delighted to see that “the big moves are there—the
arrival and the steps and then suddenly the perspective and
walking through trees down to this wonderful thing,” she adds.
“It was marvelous, in the rain. It was beautiful, really. Bill gave
a wonderful introduction and description of its making. And
it was wonderful to see people from Penn, a couple of whom
had participated and worked in Lou’s office.”
At the very end of our long interview, Nathaniel suddenly
asks a question of his mother that pulls her up short. “Did
you miss Lou, when you went to Roosevelt Island? Did you
think about him?”
A pregnant silence follows.
“That’s quite a question,” she says. “I don’t know really what I felt.
I was just very anxious and very curious and very worried.”
“Well, you were carrying that with you for him, in a way,”
Nathaniel suggests. “You were worried for him, too.”
Harriet Pattison looks up then, and the little cloud of uncertainty
that had been hanging over her dissipates.
“Well, when I got to the end, and people had disappeared,
and I was right there, alone, I thought about him,” she says
finally. “There was nobody there then. And I felt wonderful.
He did it.”◆
THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 2013 49